Erotic Saturday: Exposed Bums at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

"Culture occurs at the edge" — attributed to Roland Barthes

Another thought about Alexander McQueen and the exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, "Savage Beauty," running until August here in New York City.


I agree with the late fashion designer Alexander McQueen. He designed a style of pantalons that expose just a little bit of the buttocks, as seen in the above picture (which he playfully called bumsters). McQueen believed the most erotic part of a person's body, whether male or female, is their slightly exposed backside. 


I agree. The mesh of clothes revealing a gap of skin is erotic indeed.


Roland Barthes put the same thought in a slightly different way:

"Is not the most erotic portion of a body where the garment gapes? In perversion (which is the realm of textual pleasure) there are no "erogenous zones" (a foolish expression, besides); it is intermittence, as psychoanalysis has so rightly stated, which is erotic: the intermittence of skin flashing between two articles of clothing (trousers and sweater), between two edges (the open-necked shirt, the glove and the sleeve); it is this flash itself which seduces, or rather: the staging of an appearance-as-disappearance. " 

Credit: Catherine McGann/Getty Images
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